The present invention relates generally to seats intended for infants and other small children and, more particularly, to such seats which are designed to be susceptible of multiple uses.
A wide variety of seat structures are commonly available and in widespread use for seated or reclining support of infants and other small children in a variety of situations, including for example automobile car seats designed for securement to an automobile seat by a conventional safety belt, wheeled push-type strollers and carriages, standstill high chairs for use during feeding of an infant or other child, and wheelchairs for disabled children. For the most part, such seating structures are designed and intended for one use only and generally are not conveniently adaptable for other uses. For example, while the ability of a car seat to be selectively belted in and unbelted from a automobile seat makes such seating structures theoretically useable for infant seating elsewhere, conventional car seats are seldom put to other uses primarily because their size and bulk make them generally inconvenient to install and remove from an automobile seat on a recurring basis and their safety straps are generally not easily removable or movable out of the way to better facilitate use as a general purpose seat outside an automobile.
To partially address these problems, it has been proposed to construct an infant/child car seat of two separable components: a base or frame securable on an automobile seat by its safety belt and a seat which may be selectively mounted and de-mounted to and from the base or frame, providing the advantage of enabling the base or frame to generally always be left in an automobile secured in place by a seat belt while the seat may be mounted on the base or frame when necessary to transport an infant or child but removed from the base or frame for use as a child carrier or general purpose seat when the infant or child is not traveling. Representative examples of this type of car seat construction are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,634,177; 4,729,600; Des. 294,777; 4,743,063; 4,915,446; and 4,943,113. While these structures generally function satisfactorily in the manner intended, none of these prior structures contemplate the possibility of mounting the removable seat to an auxiliary or secondary frame or base when removed from the automobile base or frame, so that the range of uses of the seat component of these structures outside the automobile are relatively limited.